


I Had A Dream That You Were With Me (It Wasn't My Fault)

by xoxoCorinne



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Felicity Dies In This One, dark au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-09
Updated: 2014-09-09
Packaged: 2018-02-16 19:23:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2281665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xoxoCorinne/pseuds/xoxoCorinne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dark AU: The first rule of the job is not to get attached to the target. Does the rule still apply after the job is completed?</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Had A Dream That You Were With Me (It Wasn't My Fault)

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from the song 'My Never' by Blue October.
> 
> Thank you to my betas. You really put up with a lot from me!
> 
> This is dedicated to my loves, Tris and Elena. I love you.

Fanmix to go with the story is [here](http://open.spotify.com/user/1219554636/playlist/5t27ecRPmFW4puqfqBl7gX).

* * *

 

Everyone knows the story. Oliver Queen, had been trapped on a deserted island for 5 years. He returned to the city and picked up right where he left off, a reckless child of a man who remained unchanged by an misfortune thrown his way.

 

The real Oliver Queen, the one that came back, is a whole other animal. Oliver uses his public persona to cover up who he really is, a killer. He works for ARGUS, fulfilling a debt. ARGUS allowed him to return to his family, in return they owned him. They had him do what he does best, kill.

 

Which brings him to where he is tonight, in the townhouse of a young woman named Felicity Smoak. Waller had handed him the file and told him to take care of it. The file was rather light, nothing much was known about the girl, even by ARGUS, which was a red flag in and of itself.  What was known about Felicity Smoak was that she was ‘The Oracle,’ a hacker who was direct threat to ARGUS. And threats? They needed to be eliminated.

 

“Felicity Smoak?”

 

“I know who you are.” she said, her voice stronger than Oliver had thought it would be.

 

“Is that so?” he asked, bow drawn, stalking around her like an animal on the hunt.

 

“You’re Mr. Queen.”

 

He was going to kill her anyway, so he didn’t see a point in lying to the girl. “No, Mr. Queen was my father.”

 

“Right, but he’s dead. I mean he drowned. Which you didn’t and unfortunately that left you free to kill me.” she rambled at him, he quickly suppressed the genuine smile that dared to cross his face. He didn’t smile. And he certainly wasn’t going to smile for her.

 

To Oliver, she seems weak. She hides behind a computer to do her biddings. She works a menial job, at his own family’s company, in fact. But now the time had come for him to kill her, and she surprised him.

 

Felicity Smoak does not beg for her life. She doesn’t give him the satisfaction of it.

 

“I feel sorry for you.” she said, stepping forward, toward the arrow pointed at her chest. “Whatever you went through to get you here. Whatever it was you had to do to get to this point.”

 

He was speechless. The silence that filled the room was louder than anything he had experienced before.

 

“I am here to kill you, Ms. Smoak. It is not because I want to. It’s a job. You are a job.” he pulled on the bow string a little harder; the arrow inched back, away from her chest.

 

“You are a coward. You hide behind this hood and this bow. You blindly follow order like a dog! So kill me. Complete your job. Go home, get your pat on the head and a scratch behind your ear...”

 

He released the arrow without warning. It plunged into her heart, making a sickening sound that had never bothered him before.

 

He stays with her as she dies. Not to give her some sense of comfort or peace. He has to make sure the job is completed. She takes her last breath, and he stands over her, making his call back to ARGUS. They’ll send a team over and “take care of it.”

 

He leaves her on the living room floor like she is nothing. Because in the end, she is. She was the job. Then he does something that he has never done before. He looks back.

 

 

* * *

 

 

It has only been a week since Oliver had completed the Smoak job when she first appears to him. She is standing before him, in his living room, looking even more alive than she did when he had met her.

 

She’s wearing the light pink button down shirt and dark pencil skirt she wore the night he killed her. Her current appearance is missing the blood stain and the arrow through the heart, for which Oliver let out a sigh of relief.

 

He just stares at her, blaming the alcohol and lack of sleep from the hard week for his current situation. Then, using that soft voice of hers, she spoke to him.

 

“Why did you kill me?”

 

“You were a threat to ARGUS.” he replied simply.

 

“No. That’s why Amanda Waller had you kill me. Why did you kill me?” she tilts her head in what most would construe as confusion, but Oliver saw as judgment.

 

“Any threat to ARGUS is a threat to me. I handle threats.” he says in a tense tone, realizing the absurdity of a conversation he was pretty sure he was having with himself.

 

“My ego appreciates being viewed as a threat. Well, I guess not so much now, seeing as it ended up with me being dead and all, but I was no threat to you. The only threat in your life, is Amanda Waller. She stole your humanity, Oliver Queen.”

 

“Is that so?”

 

“Yes. And I intend to help you get it back.” she smiled sweetly at him, making his stomach turn. He had killed her, he didn’t deserve to see her smile, much less have one directed at him.

 

Moreover, in that moment, she terrified him.

 

Before he could respond, she disappeared.

 

* * *

 

For the next few weeks, every time Oliver returns to his home after a job, she is there waiting for him. She wears the same outfit, and bright pink lipstick still paints her lips. For someone who survived Hell, and considering did what he did for a living, Oliver Queen did not scare easily. But she continues to scare him.

 

But she didn’t (or couldn't?) follow him into his sleep. So every night he would alternate between working himself into an exhaustion or drinking until he passes out. A man in his line of work could not afford to feel guilt, and the less time he spent under her spell the better.

 

He doesn't remember when he stops wanting to hide from her.

 

As far as things to do with a ghost went, the things Oliver and Felicity did were pretty mundane. But mundane is what he needs in his life. He would come home and they would watch television together. She would tell him her favorite shows, and he would record them for her, even if they were shows he had never watched himself.

 

In an increasingly less rare moment, she made him smile.

 

“What’s your WiFi password?” she asks turning her attention away from the television screen to face him. He could never quite get used to looking at her. Her beauty, like her personality, was a soft and gentle one.

 

“Felicity Smoak, the Oracle, needs dumb old me to give her the WiFi password?” he chuckles, surprising them both.

 

“I just thought I’d be polite.” she mumbled, moving to pick up a tablet that rested on the coffee table.

 

She couldn’t pick up the tablet. So, for the first time, she cried. She cries about dying, about him killing her, about everything she couldn’t do. He doesn’t move to comfort her, he doesn’t deserve to comfort her, and she leaves him that night before he falls asleep.

 

She doesn’t return to him the next night, and he finds himself missing her. Craving her weird glow and her goodness that drove out the darkness he brought with him everywhere he went.

 

* * *

 

 

When she returns to him, they don’t speak of that night. Instead, he reheats the old takeout in his fridge, and turns on one of her shows, allowing them to fall back into their old rhythm.

 

Without thinking, he offers her the old Chinese food. She looks at him with a sad smile and shakes her head. “I can’t eat. I’m just a ghost.”

 

The next night, he comes home and she asks him not to turn on the TV. She askes him to just sit with her and talk.

 

So they do.

 

She tells him of growing up in Vegas, and her time at MIT. She tells him facts about herself that gave him more questions than answers. She was afraid of kangaroos. She liked red wine. Her favorite book was Wuthering Heights. She babbled, as well, much like the first and only time he met her.

 

He returns the favor. He tells her about growing up a Queen. He tells her about all of the experiences that had forged him on the Island, and elsewhere.

 

They talk like old friends, like family, like lovers.

 

Everything about her became a part of him, and he carried that everyday.

 

* * *

 

 

So, he was in love with Felicity Smoak. It must be some kind of punishment. He has fallen in love with the ghost of the girl who he had killed. He’s the reason he can’t have her. She was gone because of him, and now he had to suffer loss of someone he never even had.

 

He looks forward to coming home every night and seeing her. He is still working for ARGUS, something that she points out everytime he comes home. She sits on their couch, and tells him all of the things he could be doing that would make a difference in the world.

 

He responds by telling her he can’t leave ARGUS. It’s not a matter of wanting to leave, he just can’t. He sold his soul to Amanda Waller, and she was never going to return it. He began to think, however, that Felicity Smoak was returning pieces of it for him.

 

The torture of being in love with someone who wouldn’t love him back, who couldn’t love him back became almost too much for him. He needs to feel nothing. His job made him feel nothing.  Or it used to. She was taking that from him, because he felt something for her.

 

She was taking his life from him, it was only fair, after all, he did take hers. Yet, at the same time she was giving it back to him.

 

* * *

 

“I don’t think I’m a ghost. Ghosts have unfinished business. I have none. I’m not angry. Well, I mean I am. You killed me. But I have made peace with it and let go.” She tells him one night, as he sits across from her in their kitchen.

 

“Then why are you here?” He was suddenly confused by their arrangement. He supposed she was haunting him, and his further punishment had been him falling in love with her.

 

“Because you can’t let me go, Oliver Queen.”

 

“I’m so sorry. For killing you. For keeping you here. For...everything.”’

 

She moves her hand and places it on his cheek. He closes his eyes, but couldn’t feel her touch. He felt her presence every day, everywhere he went, but he can’t feel her touch.

 

“I’m not real. You are just making me up. You don’t know anything about me. You had a file on me. Everything else that you are creating, is what you want me to be. What you need me to be.”

 

She leaves him that night.

 

During her time away, he was desperate to be connected to her. So he reads Wuthering Heights, her favorite book. There was a quote from the book that struck him to his core.

 

"She burned too bright for this world."

 

Felicity Smoak had burned too bright for this world. But who was he to have extinguished that light?

 

 

* * *

 

 

He vists her grave. He doesn’t deserve to visit it. He doesn’t deserve to mourn her, to stand in the same spot as those who lost her and cry for her.

 

When he make his move to go, realizing he had spent hours just sitting next to her, he is met by John Diggle. He was in the file. John Diggle was in the army. He worked private security before heading up the whole security division at Queen Consolidated, which is where he met Felicity Smoak.

 

John Diggle was never viewed by ARGUS as an immediate threat. That was, until the murder of his best friend. The file they had on her, undersold the strength of their bond. Oliver suspected it wouldn’t be long before Waller handed him John Diggle’s file, calling him the next assignment.

 

“She was my best friend. My sister, really.” John Diggle said to Oliver’s retreating form, causing him to halt in his tracks. He slowly turns to the man who had addressed him.

 

“I’m sorry for your loss.” Oliver replies. I’m sorry for stealing her from you.

 

“Do you make it a habit of visiting all of your family’s lowly employees?” John Diggle, wiser than any file could credit him, gives Oliver a knowing look. “Don’t get me wrong. She is anything but lowly, to me. She was the world to me.”

 

“I met her once. She changed my life. I’ll just go, let you have your time.” he turned away.

 

“She does.” John says taking a breath, “Changes people’s lives. She had this kid she mentored. His name was Roy. That kid looked at her like she was the second coming. Anyway, Roy once told me that we ‘should all live our lives being the person Felicity Smoak saw us as,’ and he was right, Mr. Queen.”

 

Oliver moved to speak once more, but he was cut off. “We can’t always be who she’d want us to be. But in the end, we can spend the rest of our lives making up for it and just trying to be a fraction of the person Felicity thought we were.”

 

And with that John Diggle leaves him standing alone. Oliver knows what he has to do now. He has to leave ARGUS. He has to let Felicity go. He has to live the life she saw for him.

 

* * *

 

 

He quits ARGUS the following day, to honor Felicity. Amanda had threatened him. He responds by that killing him would only be doing him a favor.

 

Though he knows that wouldn’t be completely true. Dying wouldn’t allow him to be with her. He knows he won’t even get to see her after it all ends. He knows they aren’t going to the same place.

 

He comes home that night to her. She’s sitting on their couch, beautiful as ever, and smiling up at him.

 

“Is it weird that I missed you? I mean you killed me, I shouldn’t miss you.” she babbles on for a moment more, and he let her. He relished every moment with her, knowing he would soon have no more.

 

“I missed you too, but it’s time for you to go. It’s time for me to let you go, Felicity.” Tears were already clouding his vision.

 

“You want me to go.” she asks sadly, moving towards him. This time, when she places her hand upon his cheek, he feels it. He feels her.

 

“I don’t want to let you go, but...I don’t even deserve to have your ghost.” His heart broke further as he opened his eyes, and saw her blue ones filled with unshed tears. “I love you, Felicity Smoak. Do you understand?”

 

“Maybe we’ll see each other on the other side?” she offers with that smile that made his whole world spin.

 

“No.” he pauses. “We probably won’t.”

 

The world around him felt cold, in a way it never had before. They looked at each other and they both knew. It was time.

 

“You deserved better.” He apologizes.

 

“So did you.” She smiled.

 

And then she was gone.

 

* * *

 

 

Living without Felicity Smoak, even her ghost, was like breathing with bruised ribs. It could be done, but barely. Every breath taken and every move made, came with a dull ache that would never subside.

 

The pain doesn’t last for long.

 

He still hasn’t gotten used to returning to the apartment and not seeing her there. Every time he walks through the door, it was like reliving the loss of her all over again. However, when he returned home on this night, someone was waiting for him.

 

John Diggle.

 

He sits on the couch. Gun in his hand, waiting.

 

Oliver didn’t have time to tell him to pull the trigger, or beg for his life. He thought about how Felicity wouldn’t have wanted this for John, and he blamed himself. He had destroyed John Diggle to the point where he wouldn’t be the person Felicity would have wanted him to be. But he knew John would spend the rest of his life trying to be that person again.

 

John doesn’t say a word. He doesn't mention how Oliver stole her away, or how this was revenge. All he does is pull the trigger.

 

Oliver was right about one thing, in the end, he doesn’t see Felicity Smoak.

 


End file.
